


Girls, Memories, and Hotel Bars

by Aria_Faye



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: F/F, Happy Ending, Old Flames, Russian Skate Family - Freeform, Sexuality Crisis, bisexual disasters everywhere, less forgiving universe than canon, new flames
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 10:07:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25847800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aria_Faye/pseuds/Aria_Faye
Summary: It started the year after Victor and Yuuri kissed at the Cup of China.
Relationships: Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov, Lilia Baranovskaya/Okukawa Minako, Mila Babicheva/Sara Crispino, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 28





	Girls, Memories, and Hotel Bars

**Author's Note:**

> Hello friends! This is the piece I did for the YOI Primadonna zine ages ago. I keep forgetting to post my old zine work here, so I'm doing it now, while I'm thinking of it. The zine was centered around the ladies of YOI, so as such, ladies will be the focus here. Enjoy. :)

It started the year after Victor and Yuuri kissed at the Cup of China—after their exhibition pair skate and the news of their engagement and after Yuuri moved to St. Petersburg to be with the man he loved. The two of them shared the ice every day, and Victor was brutal as usual. Yuuri was determined, also as usual. But it was after practice that Mila watched them the hardest. When they were no longer coach and student, no longer competitors. She watched them lean against each other on the bench as they unlaced their skates and she watched them smile. Sometimes Yuri would throw his towel at them when they got a little too cute. Mila just watched it all and wondered how she never even knew.

It should have been obvious. In hindsight, Victor was clearly the gayest person she had ever met in her life. But, aside from his dubiously close relationship with his best friend, Victor had spent his life curiously single. And yeah, he’d had long hair once upon a time. But so did plenty of other artistic teenage boys looking to rebel in some small, safe way. Yeah, he’d varnished his nails and worn lip gloss and painted his silver eyelashes dark with mascara. Mila had been young then, and she’d always assumed it was a fashion trend of the day—one she had been too small to remember. Victor was, after all, nearly ten years older than her.

But then the Cup of China had happened. He’d practically dove onto the ice, kissing Yuuri on live, international television. It was all people could talk about for months. And it really shouldn’t have surprised Mila. Not really.

But it had.

Russia wasn’t a very friendly place for people like Victor. (Mila chose to ignore how she couldn’t even think the word _homosexual_ , much less say it aloud.) She had never seen two men behave the way Victor and Yuuri did. Sure, in other countries. But never at home. And never Victor.

So she watched Yuuri interact with Victor, and Victor interact with Yuuri, and she tried to figure out if what she was feeling lay more along the lines of intrigue or disgust. She never said anything aloud, of course, but seeing them kiss sent shivers down her spine. She didn’t look at it too closely, though, just in case those shivers weren’t a bad thing after all.

Eventually, she got used to it. Victor and Yuuri. Yuuri and Victor. Little Yuri even got a bit bold and started wearing matching red bracelets with Otabek Altin—even though he swore they were nothing more than best friends. And Mila dated another hockey player.

It started at Skate Canada, the year after Victor and Yuuri became _Victuuri_ to the internet. They were trending again after they appeared together at the Trophee de France. Maybe it was just the general aura of _gay_ in the air that made Mila look at Sara when she skated onto the ice for her SP, but, when she caught her eyes lingering a bit too long on Sara’s legs, she quickly looked at her phone. Her lanyard. Anything.

And, after Sara stepped off the ice again, roses and plushies in her arms, Mila met her smile with the briefest eye contact imaginable before practically fleeing into her own short program.

If she stepped out of her first triple, it was nobody’s business but her own.

At the hotel bar after, she didn’t feel much like celebrating. Fourth place was nothing to her. She should have done better. If she wanted to keep her spot in the GPF, she knew she’d have to tighten it up tomorrow in her free skate.

When Sara trotted over, Mila tried to look busy. But she’d put herself in a corner and was currently unoccupied, so mostly she just felt foolish.

But then Sara was in front of her, laying a hand on her hand and asking if she was okay. Mila suddenly didn’t like seeing those big eyes looking so troubled. So she pulled on a smile and said, “Yeah. Just…boy stuff.”

Sara drew closer, which was the exact opposite of what Mila had intended, and said, “Want to talk?” Mila had always known Sara had long eyelashes, but she watched them now as Sara blinked. She could have sworn a single blink would have started a hurricane on the other side of the world.

“Ah—no,” Mila replied. Shrugging, like it was nothing. Like she hadn’t broken up with her hockey player du jour a week ago. “It’s fine.”

With a squeeze to Mila’s hand, Sara leaned close and whispered sympathetically, “Boys really are the worst, aren’t they?”

_Aren’t they?_ Mila thought. Echoing in her head, long after Sara had left her to her moping. After shutting herself in her hotel room and locking the door. After watching Victor’s SP from the Trophee de France on Youtube in the dark. _Boys really are the worst, aren’t they?_

She didn’t watch Sara’s free skate the next day.

Mila took bronze at Skate Canada and went home in a sulk. She’d have to do better at Rostelecom if she wanted to make it safely into the GPF. Sara had it much easier with her gold.

She pushed herself like mad at practice, throwing herself recklessly into jumps and spins. She blazed through step sequences, fast and sloppy (like her ex). Yakov didn’t comment, but Victor did, appearing at her elbow as she paused for water one day. She hissed at him to get lost.

He, predictably, ignored her. “What are you doing?” he asked, like she was committing some great atrocity by training harder than usual. “You’re going to burn yourself out before Rostelecom if you keep going like this.”

“It’s not your job to protect me, Victor,” she snapped. “Last I checked, you weren’t _my_ coach.”

“But I’m your friend,” Victor said. He ran a hand through his hair and sighed when she glared at him. “Look, you don’t have to listen to me,” he said, “but just…maybe take it a bit easier, yeah? You look chaotic out there. You’re going to hurt someone.” He didn’t say that she was going to hurt _herself_ , but she understood it in the subtext.

She cut her eyes at him again and slammed her water bottle down on the boards harder than was strictly necessary. Little droplets flung from the top. “Piss off, Victor,” she said, and she skated away from him hard. She spent the rest of the day concentrating on the way her blades dug into the ice. Determinedly _not_ thinking of gold medals and the pretty, olive throats they circled.

Sara was not at Rostelecom.

Mila skated two lovely, clean programs, despite the bone-deep ache from weeks of intense practice, and she walked away with a gold medal and a spot in the GPF.

Yuri Plisetsky—with Lilia at his side—took home the matching men’s gold. If he had noticed that she’d had to move one of her quads up from the back half of her program, he didn’t comment on it.

After, Mila let herself relax. She was three drinks deep in her hotel room when she got the text:

_> >Congratulations on your gold!! See you at the GPF!!_

Mila turned off her phone.

It took exactly twelve seconds for Lilia to sit down beside her in the airport while the three of them waited on their flight back home. Mila had been sulking. She had tried scrolling through social media, but she had known Sara for years now. Her unfairly pretty face kept popping up everywhere, unsolicited. And, if it wasn’t Sara, it was Victor. Or Yuuri. And she really just… _couldn’t_ with any of it right then. So she had been sitting, playing some mindless Candy Crush on her phone when she felt Lilia beside her in the same way one feels a glacier press its coldness into one’s bubble of warmth.

She looked up. “Um…hi.” She said.

Lilia just drilled her with that ballet teacher stare.

When Mila moved to go back to her game, Lilia spoke: “There’s nothing wrong with you, you know.”

Mila blinked. “What?” she stammered, while her mind immediately tensed up into a blind panic. How could Lilia have known? Had she been obvious? And, for that matter, what was she even being obvious _about?_ It wasn’t like she _liked_ Sara or anything. She mentally listed the names of every one of her boyfriends, just to reinforce this.

“I see the way you look at her,” Lilia said. “You could do far worse than Sara Crispino, you know.”

“I—I’m not like that,” Mila protested immediately.

Lilia just arched a brow.

“I don’t like girls,” Mila reiterated, though she sounded weak even to her own ears. But she _didn’t_.

With a shrug, Lilia said, “Suit yourself,” and looked straight ahead.

They sat the rest of the hour in immensely uncomfortable silence. Mila tried to focus on her game, but she kept losing the same level over and over. Eventually, she sighed. “Fine, okay?” she said to Lilia. “Fine.”

“So you admit that you care for her?”

“No!” Mila said. “I just—I don’t know, alright? I’m confused.”

Somehow, Lilia’s impassive face made Mila want to spill everything right into Lilia’s lap. But before she could, Lilia angled herself just an inch closer and quietly said, “It can be very confusing, yes.”

That stopped Mila’s spiraling thoughts cold. “You—I—” she stammered. “What?” When Lilia just looked at her, she added, “But you were married to Yakov!”

“That means nothing,” Lilia said dismissively. “Now, will you talk, or will you listen?”

Mila opened and closed her mouth a moment before saying, “I don’t want to talk.”

Lilia nodded. “Then you will listen. And you will learn.” She drew a breath. “Ask Katsuki sometime about Okukawa Minako—his ballet teacher back in Japan.”

“Did you…” Mila cleared her throat. “Did you know her or something?”

Lilia’s voice dropped even softer. “I knew her in every way that it is possible to know another person.” Something like a smile tugged at the corner of Lilia’s mouth, and Mila stared. “We toured with the same ballet company, once upon a time. We were only a bit older than you are now, and she was beautiful. Her dancing had the power to bring tears. I thought very highly of her—respected her. She must have thought similarly of me, because we became friends.”

Mila watched Lilia, transfixed.

“The first time we kissed, she was drunk,” Lilia said. “I was not drunk enough. I refused her.” She fell silent as a man passed close to them, and she waited until they wouldn’t be overheard before continuing. “Things grew tense, as one would expect. For an entire year, I avoided her. Our friendship deteriorated because of it. It was miserable for both of us.

“Then, one day in winter, I _was_ drunk enough. I approached her. When I asked to kiss her, she responded with enthusiasm. By the end of the night, we had gone back to her hotel room and made love several times. Neither of us slept that night.”

Mila felt herself blushing fiercely. Thankfully, Lilia wasn’t looking at her—seemingly lost in her memories.

She tried to imagine what that would even entail—sex with a woman. A small voice in the back of her mind reminded her that she already knew, since _she_ was a woman. But before she could get too embarrassingly deep in that particular train of questions, Lilia spoke again.

“My time as her lover was the best time of my life,” she said. “And, in the end, we toured through Russia. My hometown. I panicked.” She pressed her lips together tightly. “I have not seen or heard from Okukawa Minako in thirty years. I broke her heart, I think sometimes. I married Yakov because he was safe, but you know perfectly well how that ended up. It wasn’t that I didn’t love him. It was simply that nothing with him was as heady or as potent as it was with her.”

For a moment, neither of them spoke. Mila gaped at Lilia, and Lilia stared out the window. Outside, the planes came and went, taking people to new places, old places, and everything in between. And it was perhaps this transient feeling in the air of the airport that made Mila say, “I think I love her.”

Lilia hummed in acknowledgment. “Then don’t lose her.”

Mila thought of this the whole plane ride home. She replayed the conversation over and over in her head, always ending with her own words: _I think I love her._ Across the aisle, Lilia and Yuri settled in—Lilia for a nap and Yuri with his cat ear headphones. Occasionally, he looked at her across the aisle, like he could smell her brooding. She stuck out her tongue at him, and he left her alone.

Of _course_ Victor was the one picking them up at the airport when they got home.

Mila tried to slide into the back seat without him noticing that, in the course of the last few hours, her entire word had been completely uprooted. But Victor was more observant than people thought, and his face flickered in all the wrong ways when he looked at her. She pulled out her phone and refused to meet his eyes.

She was just about to start playing another inane game when a text pinged into her phone.

_> >I’m here if you need to talk or whatever._

Beside her, Yuri looked down at his phone. Thumbing through cat pictures on Instagram. She drilled him with a stare until he looked up. He blushed. Then, he scowled, like he could hide his pink cheeks with enough wrinkles between his eyebrows.

Mila texted back: _Smooth, Plisetsky._

She watched Yuri’s thumbs mash the screen as he typed back.

_> >Well sorry for wanting to help. You just looked like someone pissed in your coffee._

The text sat on her screen, her thumbs hovering over it. She debated just locking her phone and staring out the window, but Yuri was her best friend. And—maybe she couldn’t put her feelings into words right then, but he always seemed to understand her better than most.

_< <It’s Sara._

Yuri wasted no time.

_> >What about her?_

After a long hesitation (during which she could feel Yuri deliberately not-staring at her), she replied: _Everything._

_> >You like her?_

_< <…I think so._

Yuri looked at her. She sighed.

_< <Okay, yes._

_> >Talk to Victor._

Mila turned sharply to him. For a moment, they had an argument entirely in facial expressions and subtle hand gestures that wouldn’t garner attention from the front seat. Eventually, Yuri turned away and mashed at his phone some more.

_> >If I can talk to him about gay shit, so can you._

She stared at Yuri across the back seat.

_< <When did you talk to him??_

_> >Does it matter??_

Mila decided that it did not, in fact, really matter. Even though she was abruptly extremely curious.

_> >Just talk to him._

She sighed.

In the passenger seat, Lilia had dozed off against the window. Victor was being…unusually quiet. Every so often, his eyes would flick up into the rear view mirror and snag on Mila’s. The radio played some top-forty pop song, the volume kept whisper-low. Mila thought it didn’t suit the song at all.

They were nearly back to the dorms when she finally jabbed a response into her phone:

_< <Fine._

It took her a solid week to get up the courage to talk to Victor. Every day—sometimes several _times_ a day—Yuri would cut his eyes over at her and shoot her a glance like _Well? Have you talked to him yet?_

Every day, Mila would shake her head, and Yuri would roll his eyes.

If Victor knew the struggle that was going on inside her head, he never said anything.

One afternoon, though, she found herself alone with Victor in the lobby outside the rink proper. Yuuri had just kissed Victor goodbye ( _“See you at home, Vitenka.”_ ), and Yuri was still on the ice with Georgi and Yakov. Mila looked across the chasm of benches to where Victor frowned at a spiral notebook, pen in hand. She took a breath.

“What’s that?” she asked, and Victor’s head lifted.

It took him a minute to focus on her, even though she was the only other person in the room. He gave the notebook a little wave. “Oh. Just making some changes to my exhibition skate.”

Cautiously, she stood in her skate guards and moved to the bench opposite him. He handed her the notebook. “Hmm,” she said, taking in all the abbreviations and shorthand scribbled in Victor’s awful scrawl. “You sure about the triple-double combo coming out of the step sequence?” she asked. “There’s not much space for building momentum.”

Victor shrugged. “That’s why I want to do it.”

Of course it was.

Mila resisted the urge to stall by having him break down his step sequences into their elements. Instead, she took a breath, swallowed, and handed the notebook back. “Actually,” she heard herself say, “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Oh?”

She swallowed again. “Yeah.” She shifted over to sit beside him, and he pushed his skate bag out of the way. She wasn’t sure why, but something in that movement made her feel safe. She had never considered Victor to be a big brother figure before, but…well…

“Yura said I could talk to you,” she said.

Victor leaned his elbows onto his thighs and looked at her. “You can talk to me about anything.”

One more breath, and she forced herself to say it: “About…gay stuff?’

Victor’s face softened into a smile—the kind that the press never got to see and the kind that she’d seen on his face so much more since he’d met Yuuri. “Gay stuff is my favorite stuff,” he said.

And, with Victor sitting beside her, his face open in that disarming smile, Mila talked.

She talked about Skate Canada and Sara’s legs and her pretty, pretty eyes. She talked about Yuuri and Victor and little Yura and _gay_. About how her stomach still churned to think _what if_. How she didn’t know what to do, how she felt like she didn’t even know herself anymore. How she had no idea how to move forward—and how to not get into trouble. More than once, she said that she should really just forget it and message that guy back—the one who had been trying to get her attention for a long time. And, each time she said those things, Victor laid a gentle hand on her arm, arresting her with that one simple gesture, and told her to please continue with what she had been saying before.

Somehow, after too long a time she was sure, Mila ran out of words. It happened abruptly, in the middle of a sentence. She finished with a vague gesture and willed herself not to cry.

Victor didn’t bat an eye. Just kept looking at her with those inviting, safe eyes. By the time Mila realized what she had just done—how she’d spilled her apparently gay guts out to her rinkmate and how terribly _inappropriate_ that undoubtedly was, how dangerous, how risky—Victor was pulling her into a hug.

She had never been hugged by Victor before. Not once. It took a moment for her arms to catch up and go around him. “Mila,” he murmured into her hair, soft and comforting, “it’s going to be alright.”

The longer she stayed in his arms, the more she believed him.

Eventually, he pulled back and held her at arms’ length. Smiled again, this time with a glint of teasing in his eye. “I’m proud of you. It took you a while, but I always knew Georgi was the only hopelessly straight one.”

She shoved at him to hide her teary smile.

“In all seriousness,” he said, still holding onto her forearm loosely, “I’m so happy you found someone who makes you feel this way. It may not be the norm here, but there is nothing wrong with what you’re feeling. Our country’s just a little behind the curve, that’s all.”

Mila nodded. Scooted just a bit closer. “Were you scared?” she asked. She hoped he would understand the rest, and by the look in his eyes, he did.

He considered it for a moment before finally saying, “Yes.” He hesitated. “Do you know I used to pass as a girl whenever Chris visited? Back when we were together? So we could be a couple out in public?”

“No,” Mila said, bewildered.

“I still have some of my dresses,” Victor said with a sad little smile. “Our country will catch up someday. But not if people like us hide in the shadows. Or—in the closet, if you prefer.” He flashed that teasing glint at her again.

“But what if they cut me?” Mila whispered. She hadn’t wanted to let this particular fear gain a foothold, but…talking to Victor, she felt safe enough to let it out.

Victor laughed. Actually laughed. “Mila, they wouldn’t cut you! You’re a national treasure! They _need_ you. Believe me, they won’t cut you. You’re too good.”

“You think so?”

“Mila, I know so,” he said. Then, more soberly, he continued, “It’s never easy to be among the first to challenge a system. Believe me, I know. But…you and I. Yura too. We’re in a position to do it. We have a platform to make a change. Leverage to protect ourselves. You obviously have no obligation to do anything, but…consider the fact that you, just by being yourself, could change the world.” He looked at her. She wasn’t sure when his hands had found hers, but they sat now, angled knee to knee, Victor squeezing her hands, and Mila was sure that this was what having a brother felt like. “That was what got me to stop passing,” Victor added.

“In public?” Mila gasped.

“Oh no! No. Usually only outside the country. On live, international television, though. You have to be smart about it.”

Mila nodded dazedly. “Right,” she said. She tried to ignore the way her mind had begun to spin with fantasies of sitting in Sara’s kiss-and-cry, holding her hand as they waited on her scores.

With another squeeze to her hands, Victor brought her back to reality. “I’m here for you,” he said. “I’m on your side. Okay?”

She squeezed his hands back and said, “Okay.”

Talking to Yuuri was harder.

Being that Yuuri didn’t speak Russian completely as yet, it was hard to get him alone. He and Victor were almost always orbiting each other, speaking a bizarre combination of languages from inside their own little world.

Eventually, though, Victor invited everyone over for another one of their ‘family dinners,’ as he called them. So, while Georgi and Victor were doing dishes and Yuri was playing with Makkachin, Mila sat down beside Yuuri. “Hi,” she said.

He looked up at her and smiled. “Hey Mila,” he said. He locked his phone over a half-composed message and put it on the coffee table. “Everything okay?” he asked. For a minute, she panicked that Victor had said something. But then she remembered that Yuuri was just generally a considerate person. So she took a breath.

“Okukawa Minako,” she said.

“…is my ballet instructor?” Yuuri tried, and Mila flushed as she realized that she hadn’t even given any context.

She tried again: “I think I’m gay.” When Yuuri just looked at her, she backpedaled. “Well—maybe. Well, not completely. Can you be a little bit gay? I think I’m a little bit gay. Only for one person. So far. Not completely gay.”

Yuuri took a sip of tea from the mug by his knee and blinked at her. After what felt like an eternity, he swallowed and said, “First of all, yes you can be just a little bit gay. Or just gay for one person. You know I’m not completely gay, right? Not the way Victor is.”

She gaped at him. No, she hadn’t known.

“I’m bisexual,” Yuuri said, dunking his teabag. “I like women and men. Both.”

“Oh,” Mila said. She had never heard of bisexual before.

Yuuri set his mug beside his phone. “Minako is too, if that’s why you’re mentioning her. She’s bisexual, like me.”

That brought Mila miles back to the actual reason she’d wanted to speak to Yuuri in the first place. “Um, yes,” she said. “Lilia said I should ask you how she is.”

“Lilia did?”

“Yeah.”

Yuuri shrugged. “I guess she’s okay. I didn’t know Lilia knew her.”

“Um. It seems they toured in the ballet together a long time ago,” Mila said. She felt her face heating up and prayed that it hadn’t metastasized into a blush that Yuuri could see yet.

“Funny. Minako never mentioned her.”

Hmm. Funny indeed.

Mila ran a hand through her hair. “Do—um. Do you know…did Minako ever marry? Or is she… _seeing_ anyone? Currently?”

Yuuri frowned. “No, she’s been single as long as I can remember.” He shifted on the couch and added, “There have been a few boyfriends, but none of them ever stuck.”

All at once, Mila’s brain stopped spinning its wheels at the concept of ‘bisexual’ and instead became preoccupied with the most perfect idea in existence. It fell into her head fully-formed, so she really couldn’t help but ask, “Is Minako coming to the GPF?”

“I think so,” Yuuri said. “She’s a fan of Chris’ ass and I offered her a ticket, so I’m sure she’ll be there.”

Mila just nodded, getting up distractedly. She needed to talk to Victor again. Because now, she _had_ to podium at the GPF. And so did Sara.

By the end of the free program at the GPF, Mila was dead certain that she liked Sara. She had let herself watch this time, allowing her eyes the freedom to look beyond professional analysis and instead appreciate the beauty in front of them. Sara skated like her heart was on fire, and Mila did her best to do the same. A call-and-response.

Halfway through her own program, she had noticed Sara watching, open-mouthed by the boards. Mila threw in an extra double-double combo and upgraded a triple to a quad. Her legs were trembling after, but she scored a new personal best and a gold medal, coming in just a couple points under Sara’s world record. It was easily Mila’s best skate of the year. Of her life, even.

And this time, when Sara smiled up at her with her hard-won silver, Mila smiled back.

It wasn’t until they were stepping down onto the carpeted runner to leave the ice that Mila shifted her bouquet and took Sara’s hand. Sara looked up at her with those big, gorgeous eyes full of questions and hope, and Mila took a chance.

When she leaned forward, Sara’s breath caught. For a second, Mila thought she might pull away, but then—

Then they were kissing. On international television.

It wasn’t much of a kiss, to be honest. But it still set Mila’s heart racing and palms sweating. It still had the press in a frenzy, cameras flashing and interviewers shouting and the audience absolutely roaring. Mila wasn’t stupid—she knew that Victor and Yuuri had set the stage the day before by kissing each other’s medals and generally being their amorous selves. But this wasn’t about them. This was about her. This was about Sara. And this was about changing the world.

When they broke apart, she was certain she was blushing. But then, Sara’s face broke out into a smile brighter than all the lights in the arena, and she couldn’t help but do the same. They stepped off the ice hand in hand.

Immediately, their coaches collected them, pulling them off in opposite directions. So Mila shouted, “See you at the press conference?” And Sara called back, “See you!” She knew they needed to talk. But talk would come later.

For now, she needed to check her phone.

_> >She’s watching everything from the hotel bar_

Good.

She fired off a text to Yuri.

_< <Hotel bar. Now._

Yuri shot back a thumbs-up emoji.

And, as she went back to the hotel to change for the press conference, she slipped into the bar just long enough to see Okukawa Minako sit down next to Lilia Baranovskaya and shyly buy her a drink.


End file.
